Why Even In High School You don’t Always Need Grades

It seems that everyone is already tired of the constant race for good grades and do not see the point in cramming, and completing constant college essay for the praise of the teacher. You want to enjoy learning, and yes, you can. Crystal Frommert, an education major and math teacher with 20 years of experience, explains how to take your mind off the constant thoughts and worries about grades.

My students walk into class with their homework completely done; they’ve obviously prepared and are about to bombard me with questions about the topic. It’s not too important to them if they get a grade on this work-its all about knowledge… And then I wake up.

The reality is that students are constantly checking their grades in online diaries and asking questions like

• How much will I get a grade cut if I forget some topics?
• How many points will you take off my grade if I get it wrong?
• What should I do to get my grade point average closer to an A?

I’ve watched students worry only about their grades for years, and I began to wonder if my behavior might have had something to do with it. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I used to praise students for their high grades, not for their effort or progress. In meetings with parents, too, we were always focused on grades rather than how the learning was going.

During my reflections, I realized that there were teachers in my school who, like me, we’re tired of this focus on grades. We shared different approaches and strategies with each other to shift children’s attention to self-learning. But, of course, we still have to assign grades. But we got a whole list of tips on how to stop worrying about grades.

Change the way you talk to your kids and their parents

Before, if my students suddenly lost motivation to do an assignment, I would throw threats like “You need to do this because I’ll be grading these papers!” at them. Now in these situations, I try to encourage the students and say, “You did well with the simplification of radicals, and I look forward to seeing how you can apply your knowledge to the Pythagorean theorem.

Of course, this method does not always work. But realizing that my words focus children’s attention on learning, not grades, helps me fight the culture of obsession with high scores.

I now have different conversations with parents as well. In letters or phone conversations when we are discussing a student, I talk about the ideas their child offers and the skills they are gaining and demonstrating, and I no longer focus on grades.

And if parents do ask me about their child’s progress on the grading system, I say, “Devon got 35 out of 42 points on last week’s assignment. I would recommend that he consolidate the simple multipliers so that he is better prepared for the new chapter. In the language of math, I get a little tricky in these conversations because a 35 out of a possible 42 turns into a B. But I manage to distract my parents from having conversations like, “Why didn’t you get an A? You could have done better.”

Take your mind off the grading and talk to your students about their performance without mentioning grades.

I was prompted to this idea by my colleague Christy Louden’s blog about how to motivate students to listen more to feedback and teacher recommendations instead of thinking solely about grades. Kristi advised me to hold off on giving final grades and instead of announcing the results, talk to the student about their progress, their progress, and the topics they need to pay more attention to. Better yet, don’t give a grade on the work at all, if at all possible.

Kristi is an English teacher, so there are a lot of essays in her classes, but she doesn’t grade some of them, and she puts notes in the margins and gives advice on what could be improved and how to do it. It’s all aimed at helping students pump up their writing skills-maybe someone will actually become a famous author.

A math teacher colleague and I tried out Christy Louden’s strategy in our classes. We graded tests and self-study “classics”: we gave everyone the usual scores and accompanied them with brief comments. We wrote the grade on a separate list, and students simply returned the papers with our recommendations, no A’s, B’s, C’s, or F’s. After we gave the students their notebooks with our notes, we asked them to think about the remarks and correct the inaccuracies. So, we worked on the mistakes, but before giving the grade, not after, as we usually do. The first thing we had to do was to help the children make corrections and discuss their work with them, not the grade they received for it.

At first, it even annoyed the children, but over time they began to pay more attention to their weaknesses and strengths. If suddenly they needed to know their grade, I would talk to each one separately on the appointed day and tell them everything. Even though we got rid of the constant discussion of grades in class, the school still requires that all results are recorded and scores counted.

Don’t Demand too Much.

Research shows that grades for homework, quarter, or trimester should not be set definitively and irrevocably. Most of the teachers I know grade homework, but I stopped doing that a few years ago I just kept a record of who did the assignments so I had something to talk about in face-to-face meetings with students and their parents.

We agreed with the class that homework was a way for the kids to learn more about topics that interested them or to work more thoroughly on things that were challenging for them. So as not to put pressure on my students, I announced that all low scores for surveys and quizzes would disappear from my journal next semester, and we would start from scratch. This decision saved me from childhood anxiety and tears.

Introduce a Retake System.

Tests and papers that students and schoolchildren do for a tick will never help them refill their knowledge and make the most of it. When I was in high school, math classes allowed us to take retakes during the semester to correct grades we were unhappy with.

If your school doesn’t provide a way to correct your test scores, quizzes, self-study, and other important work, advocate for a retake system! You can be proactive and explain that this is what knowledge requires, not the need for a grade.

How About Having Students Grade Their Own Work?

As a high school teacher, I often encounter resistance to my methods: people ask me how to prepare kids for college or university without giving them classical grades. Of course, we cannot predict what our students will encounter when they begin higher education, but a “no grades” system is already being introduced among many college teachers.

As many education experts acknowledge, there are good reasons to abolish grading and grades: grades have been found to affect external rather than internal motivation-just so one bad grade can destroy a student’s desire to learn and enjoy the learning process, and it also increases the fear of failure that certainly does not help students succeed.